Latanius: an algorithm is a model in our mind to describe the similarities of those physical systems implementing it
Latanius understands reductionism.
Unknown: He hasn’t yet said that it is logically impossible to have something that acts like a conscious human being, but made out of other physical stuff, without consciousness.
If by “acts like” you mean “produces similar output, but with a different algorithm and different internals” then I do think consciousness will probably prove easy to fake, so long as you could study human cognition to find out what it was you were faking. Otherwise a non-conscious system would only spontaneously fake consciousness, without having computed what-to-fake using an algorithm itself conscious, at extremely low probability—like, egg spontaneously unscrambling itself probability, or the probability that a fake calculator gives correct answers to questions of the form “2 + 2 = ?” using quantum randomness rather than performing any systematic arithmetic operation.
athmwiji: Explaining subjective experience in terms of quarks is rather like trying to explain quantum mechanics in terms of aerodynamics. You will never get there. Not because subjective experience defies the laws of nature in some mysterious way, but because you would simply be going in the wrong direction.
Mind Projection Fallacy. If, in your model of the world, you start from elements you identify as ‘experience’ and infer backward to arrive at knowledge of things like atoms, it doesn’t follow that, in physics, atoms are made of experience rather than the other way around. When you hear thunder, you infer lightning, but this does not mean thunder is the cause of lightning, or that thunder is more fundamental than lightning. The order of inference exists in your map, not in the territory.
Vassar: To be fair, there are “materialists” who do make claims like these and they are guilty of scientism.
Agreed.
Richard: P.S. I use ‘scientism’ very precisely, to those who hold the indefensible assumption that empirical inquiry is the only form of inquiry (and associated verificationist claims, e.g. that only scientific discourse is coherent or meaningful).
If I believe that mathematicians and even philosophers are performing a scientifically useful form of activity, but I hold that this ability will be treated by future Bayesians as a kind of empirical observation of one’s own brain processes and legitimate deductions therefrom on impossible possible worlds, thereby yielding testable differences of anticipation, am I a scientisist?
PS: I’ve read some of Chalmers’s journal articles but not The Conscious Mind.
Latanius: an algorithm is a model in our mind to describe the similarities of those physical systems implementing it
Latanius understands reductionism.
Unknown: He hasn’t yet said that it is logically impossible to have something that acts like a conscious human being, but made out of other physical stuff, without consciousness.
If by “acts like” you mean “produces similar output, but with a different algorithm and different internals” then I do think consciousness will probably prove easy to fake, so long as you could study human cognition to find out what it was you were faking. Otherwise a non-conscious system would only spontaneously fake consciousness, without having computed what-to-fake using an algorithm itself conscious, at extremely low probability—like, egg spontaneously unscrambling itself probability, or the probability that a fake calculator gives correct answers to questions of the form “2 + 2 = ?” using quantum randomness rather than performing any systematic arithmetic operation.
athmwiji: Explaining subjective experience in terms of quarks is rather like trying to explain quantum mechanics in terms of aerodynamics. You will never get there. Not because subjective experience defies the laws of nature in some mysterious way, but because you would simply be going in the wrong direction.
Mind Projection Fallacy. If, in your model of the world, you start from elements you identify as ‘experience’ and infer backward to arrive at knowledge of things like atoms, it doesn’t follow that, in physics, atoms are made of experience rather than the other way around. When you hear thunder, you infer lightning, but this does not mean thunder is the cause of lightning, or that thunder is more fundamental than lightning. The order of inference exists in your map, not in the territory.
Vassar: To be fair, there are “materialists” who do make claims like these and they are guilty of scientism.
Agreed.
Richard: P.S. I use ‘scientism’ very precisely, to those who hold the indefensible assumption that empirical inquiry is the only form of inquiry (and associated verificationist claims, e.g. that only scientific discourse is coherent or meaningful).
If I believe that mathematicians and even philosophers are performing a scientifically useful form of activity, but I hold that this ability will be treated by future Bayesians as a kind of empirical observation of one’s own brain processes and legitimate deductions therefrom on impossible possible worlds, thereby yielding testable differences of anticipation, am I a scientisist?
PS: I’ve read some of Chalmers’s journal articles but not The Conscious Mind.